Measure for Measure

Events in Europe were on the move last week, not in the oscillatory way that made up-and-down crisis headlines, but with a slow-steady movement that left things not as they were. To those who watched only the headlines, Khrushchev lowered his pistol, but did not put it away. To those who kept their eyes only on the official documents that passed back and forth between capitals, there was no change at all in Russia's basic, unacceptable terms; there was only a new hint, reversing Khrushchev's previous stand, at a willingness to hold four-power talks.

The slow-steady forward movement of the week was this: in Washington, London, Bonn and Paris, diplomats concerned were now convinced that a Foreign Ministers' conference will be held, probably in Geneva, and that it will begin, if Russia agrees, on May 11. It might last several months, and take up the whole German question ("Agenda isn't important," said one top Briton. "Once people get together, they usually discuss anything they want to"). It would probably fail.

Khrushchev had already made plain that, when things count, his own Foreign Secretary, Andrei Gromyko, is an errand boy. Macmillan, not Selwyn Lloyd, speaks for his government; De Gaulle, not Couve de Murville, decides for France. And the U.S. would have to be represented by an ailing Secretary of State, or a new one. If Big Four talks among such proxies got nowhere, it was generally agreed, there would be a heads-of-government meeting.

Pack the Meeting. What the "four heads" might agree on was the subject of lively fears, but not much optimism. President Eisenhower, after a first reading of the latest Soviet note, hazarded that there might be some "lessening of the rigidity" of the Kremlin's line.

Khrushchev no longer dismissed a preliminary Foreign Ministers' conference as "a waste of time," but he specified that only two topics could be considered: Berlin, and a peace treaty with the two Germanys. He also insisted that to give the Soviet Union "parity," the Czechs and the Poles should be invited.

Getting in the victims as well as the victors to write the German peace had a plausible sound, but it was also part of the Russian tactics to contest the West's legal right to be in Berlin, as conquerors, until a peace treaty is concluded. Khrushchev was also aiming to pack the meeting. The British were inclined to give way on admission of the Czechs and Poles to the conference table.

United Front. The British believe in talking any time anywhere—an attitude that is frequently misunderstood, both by allies, convinced that the British are about to give something away, and by the Russians. hopeful that the British are about to concede something. On the fundamental point of Berlin, Harold Macmillan reassured his partners, he stands as firm as anyone. But not all were convinced.